The secret surveillance court that approved the U.S. government’s broad collection of millions of Americans’ e-mail and telephone records called Monday for the Obama administration to declassify and release as much as it can of one of the court’s early legal decisions sanctioning that collection.

The chief of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the Justice Department to begin a review to see how much it can reasonably declassify from a 2008 opinion — a ruling in which the court allegedly ordered Yahoo to turn over the records of its customers’ online communications.